Who Gets to Do That?
Finding a career focused on innovation and purpose
At age 12, Irene watched Pathfinder land on Mars and asked the question: Who gets to do that? Finding the answer set her on the path to where she is today, leading Applied AI at Lockheed Martin.
Irene, vice president of Applied AI at Lockheed Martin, was expected to follow a different career path. Her parents owned a small business, and the plan was straightforward: college, a business degree, the family company. Then her father got cancer.
The day he was diagnosed, the TV in his hospital room showed NASA’s Pathfinder landing on Mars. Sitting on his bed, 12-year-old Irene asked the question that changed everything: Who gets to do that?
From Space to Skunk Works®
The question followed her into high school, where her teachers gave it a name: engineering. Irene spent three years interning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the same lab she had watched put Pathfinder on Mars.
By graduation, a Lockheed Martin recruiter she'd known for years brought her a Skunk Works offer. NASA was her dream job. So was
Skunk Works. Irene knew not everyone gets the chance to be a Skunk and took the leap.
She started in mechanical design. Curiosity moved her through manufacturing, operations analysis, big data, machine learning and eventually AI.
Lowering the Barrier
Today, Irene leads the team responsible for bringing AI into Lockheed Martin’s defense ecosystem. The users aren’t AI specialists. They’re engineers. Mission planners. Supply chain leaders. Anyone solving complex problems. She says her team’s job is “lowering the barrier of entry to AI.”
That work flows into proving grounds like Cogniverse™[RT1] , where AI agents and systems are tested before deployment.
She talks about it in plain terms. It's software. The challenge is breaking it into building blocks and fitting those blocks into systems teams already use. It works with what’s already there, which she calls "radical interoperability.”
Take wildfire response. Irene lives in Southern California and has a friend who’s a fire captain. Fighting wildfires isn’t just about getting water on flames, he's told her. It's about understanding the fuel, like vegetation and brush piles, that lets the fires spread. Irene sees firefighting as a microcosm of the larger problem Lockheed Martin solves for defense: disparate data sources from ground to air to space that don't speak the same language, fused into one picture that the people on the front lines can act on.
Work with a Purpose
As powerful as AI can be, she says there’s a misconception that AI is a magic wand, and all you have to do is ask a question and trust the answer.
"AI gives you an answer very confidently based on what it's been fed," she says. "In our work, you’d rather have no information than bad information.”
At Lockheed Martin, the stakes are always high, and the information must be reliable because lives depend on it. Recently, the Lockheed Martin team received a letter from a service member in an area defended by several of the company’s systems. The message was direct: “These tools are saving lives. The warfighters on the frontlines are deeply grateful.” For Irene, the letter was a reminder of who sits on the other side of everything her team builds.
To keep that reality top of mind, her team runs regular intelligence briefings, sharing what adversaries are doing and why the work matters. . For her team, that purpose ultimately comes down to one key principle: the responsible use of AI that helps save lives.
Keep Asking
Her advice for anyone wondering “Who gets to do that?” is to stay curious. The technology will change. The instinct to solve problems is what matters.
She thinks back to sitting in the family car as a kid on a long road trip, wishing she had a portable TV to watch a movie. Today, she says her own children can't imagine boarding a plane without an endless supply of books and movies on their tablets.
"Keep imagining the unimaginable," she says, "and then be part of the solution to make that unimaginable thing a reality." Because that impulse to imagine, to build, to matter, still defines who gets to do that.